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Friday, October 10, 2008

StoresOnline: Read Up On Basic SEO Techniques

With over 300,000 “Internet Home Business” related searches on the internet every month, it’s safe to say that there is a lot of demand for information on how to make money with an online business.

Choosing a product and building your website are important, however one thing that StoresOnline Merchants need to do is basic Search Engine Optimization of their websites.

What is basic SEO? Here is an article that lays out some basic SEO techniques.

These tips may be fairly common to the more experienced Webmaster but if you are not using them, you are losing traffic.

1. Implement unique META titles and descriptions for all of your pages. Many Webmasters begin their first web site without META description and title tags at all. Once they learn that, SEO wise, it is very important to do so, they add them but they are not unique. Each title and description should be unique to each individual page.

2. Add an HTML sitemap to your site. This is a single page that includes links to the main pages of your websites. If your site is small you may want to include every page while larger sites should just have links to the most important pages. Sitemaps are an import part of SEO optimization because they give the search engines a ‘hub’ where their spiders can find all of your pages through one single page.

3. Target ‘long tail’ keywords in your sub pages. Long tail keywords are those that are not as highly competitive as your main keyword. Target a fairly competitive keyword for your index page and less competitive keywords for all sub pages. Many Webmasters have a bad habit of targeting the same few keywords throughout their entire site; because of this they are losing valuable traffic to inner pages.

4. Use underline, bold, strong and italics tags on each pages keywords. This SEO tip is one that has proven to be very valuable. Search Engines give more weight to words that are using these tags. Do not over do it, implementing these tags at least two or three times would cut it.

5. Use H1 and H2 tags with your main and secondary keywords. Most SE’s give a lot of weight to words that are wrapped in these tags. Each page on your web site should have one or two targeted keywords at the beginning of the page. Just add <>keyword< /h1 > to the main keyword and the same for your secondary keyword replacing h1 with h2 and deleting the spaces.If you have not been using the above tips in your SEO strategy then you have been missing out on quality targeted traffic. Implement these tips as soon as possible and you will start to notice an increase in visitors.

What types of Search Engine Optimization tips do you have for other StoresOnline Merchants?

Also besides the HTML sitemap that was mentioned, I find that some search engines like XML sitemaps and should be updated whenever you have a big change to your site. I'm not quite sure the limit on sitemaps that you can have for 1 site in the root directory, but sitemaps are very important and a needed thing for any website.

I have read that link trading is more and more important. Has onyone found this to be true? I am always looking for link trading partners but seriously shouldn't your site be judged based on what's on your site? Not on who you trade links with?Why do search engines care who your business partners are anyway? Does that make my site more relavant to my customers than haivng the right words and pictures on my site?

Thank you for the very useful information. I did not know that the link trading is more and more important, but I agree that your site should be judged based on what is on your site. Also, I am learning that sitemaps are important. Thanks!